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Comment by pedalpete | Hacker News Reader

Are we're relying on pilots who are holding many many things in their heads to follow only the verbal directions of air traffic control?

Two alternatives that I would think would be fairly easy to implement.

1) Google maps style directions input by air traffic control showing as well as telling the pilot what runway/path to runway to take.

2) Coloured lighting directing the pilot to the right runway via the correct path. Then the pilot only needs to know that they are following blue, and when it's time for them to move, blue comes up.

I understand this would be more work on the part of ATC, where right now they can verbally communicate, but a system such as this may also help ATC relieve some of the mental load.

Is this already happening? I can't find any links to suggest it is.

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My understanding is that there is a shit ton that is and always has been happening in this area. Air safety is the leading sector in standards for safety training.

We are relying on checklists, procedures, surveillance tech, simulation training, certification, re-certification etc. etc. No other industry has put in as much thought into these problems. Except for maybe the military.

Source: I had the opportunity to meet and participate in crisis resource management training for surgeons held by a trainer from pilot training industry. Everyone’s mind was blown because surgery is comparatively in the Middle Ages.

Based on seeing and hearing about it I believe that more ideas have been studied and tested than you’d expect. Cognitive overload in crisis situations is a well researched problem. Probably hard finding links on the subject though.

Space flight is the one industry with a better track record I’d say.

I wonder by what metric this is true. For instance, I’m sure the fatality per flight of manned space flight is an order of magnitude worse than commercial air flight in the US.

Easily *six* orders of magnitude. STS saw two crashes in O(10^2) flights (and SpaceX has much smaller numbers still). The US handles O(10^7) commercial flights per year, none of which crashed in 10+ years (I think).

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers

Ridiculous. This is comparing the modern commercial private space flight industry with the still maturing mostly public industry. Compare how dangerous the first twenty years of air flight was. We haven’t achieved the same level of commercial space flight due to just how cautious we’ve been.

Aviation statistics get pretty scary as you go down the regulatory hierarchy. Charter operations (part 135) have a worse safety record than big airlines (part 121). General Aviation pales in comparison to both. (And yup, some careless private pilots turn their C172 into an unlicensed charter airline.)

Good overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpGl2_fVr2Y

Right now, private spaceflight is basically regulated in a manner similar to Part 91 (GA) operations. The customer signs a waiver saying that the vehicle is not certified and that they've checked it out to ensure it's safe. Early days, of course.

Speculating - what if we only consider craft piloting errors? That would rule out many fatalities - Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia.

You sure? When air flight was pre-commercial it was a dangerous business indeed. Had we been as cautious as with space flight we wouldn’t have had commercial air flights until very recently.

It’s important to account for the frequency difference for these events. One of them has thousands of flights per day, the other not as many.

Take a look at:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management

Ha! Yeah crew resource management is what I meant but misremembered as critical resource management.

The reason surgery is so far behind aeronautics is likely entirely due to the fact that when a surgery goes wrong, it usually doesn't kill hundreds of people at once in a massive fireball. Everything else being equal, rare but spectacular failures tend to garner more attention than more frequent but less dramatic ones.

"The reason surgery is so far behind aeronautics is likely entirely due to the fact that when a surgery goes wrong, it usually doesn't kill hundreds of people at once in a massive fireball."

You also have to wonder how many deaths from surgery are officially classified as "Doctors messed up" vs something else that partially or fully absolves them from responsibility...

> The reason surgery is so far behind aeronautics is likely entirely due to the fact that when a surgery goes wrong

Surgery is not a public performance. How do you even find out about the mistakes that occur? Fatal mistakes, sure, maybe...

You have a better bet of your dash cam showing what happened when your car is hit by another car, if something happens to you.

I think nobody's really going to know what mistakes were made while you were on the table. Certainly not in a near miss like this case.

Very interesting reference on improving healthcare and getting honest measurements: a 2004 article by Gawande on the treatment of cystic fibrosis. [1]

[1] Atul Gawande, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/12/06/the-bell-curve

Atul Gawande’s „Checklist Manifesto” is also fantastic. He goes specifically into how airline and construction safety checklists make those industries safer and then lays out a checklist method for reducing complications in the OR.

There is some discussion on implementing black box style recording into the OR. I’ve met surgeons enthusiastic for this idea as an opportunity to geek out even more. But this enthusiasm depends on how authoritarian culture is in a given country. The OR is also often a place where people are in a corrupted power structure. I have been to countries where dangerous surgeons are covered by younger surgeons - that’s where recording in the OR is less popular.

On the other hand I have heard arguments against such recording as well. Anatomies differ, shit gets ugly to unqualified bystanders. Insurance keeps an eye on everything. Surgeons can become so careful that they prefer not to help so as not to endanger their career.

I might have over done it on the surgery bit but yeah, an individual malpractice episode is hush hush, insured and supervised, he said she said sort of thing.

> 1) Google maps style directions input by air traffic control showing as well as telling the pilot what runway/path to runway to take.

Now you've added one more thing for the pilot to look at instead of actually looking out the windows.

Head-up display? Augmented reality?

I worked at a startup on some of the earliest rollouts of Airport Collaborative Decision Making systems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport_Collaborative_Decision...

These are more about timing and throughput in airports, and less about safety critical stuff, and certainly there are new fancy navigation and runway lighting systems to help with that. But what I’ll say is that airports involve a huge number of different organisations, operating huge numbers of systems from different vendors, and until about 15 years ago there wasn’t much joining it all up end to end. To the point that a killer demo early on was merely putting the airport and all the planes on a real-time map. So, it doesn’t surprise me that a lot of the responsibility still falls on humans and processes.

On 1:

While taxiing, you're supposed to have the taxiway map up (https://flightaware.com/resources/airport/JFK/APD/AIRPORT+DI...), and something like ForeFlight (which many pilots, GA and commercial, use) will alert you when you're approaching a runway as well as once you enter it. Not sure what the instruments in a 20+ year old 777 will have to help with this (likely the taxiway map, unsure if they'll alert on runway entrance).

On communication: most modern flight computers do support getting your IFR clearance from the FAA (see CPDLC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controller%E2%80%93pilot_data_... and Tower Data Link System: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/acf/medi...). This doesn't include taxi clearance.

Looks like ForeFlight and MITRE are working on bridging the gap (take the audio taxi clearance and overlay it on the map): https://www.mitre.org/news-insights/impact-story/runway-safe...

EDIT: here's a video of the feature in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p5-7jVg8fE; looks like it's only on the most expensive plan though :/

Re #2: We already have something like this at some airports. I wonder whether it was available on the runway/taxiway in question?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runway_status_lights

Seems like the particular intersection where this incident occured is supposed to be protected by RSL:

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl/media/JFK.pd...

Runway Entrance Lights at intersection J/4L which is where the incursion happened. These are taxiway centerline lights, and should have been red at the time. Here's the gotcha: REL only illuminate once the departing aircraft reaches 30 kts. https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl/pet/

Based on the animation https://twitter.com/CaseWade/status/1614342894248394752 at 00:14, I'm pretty sure AA 106 was no longer in visual contact with REL lighting by the time DL 1943 reached 30 kts.

Related to (2) is an RWSL[0] system, which was supposedly in use at the time of this event and is designed to stop exactly this sort of thing… whether it was functioning, the pilots didn’t see it, etc, will surely come out in the ensuing investigations.

ETA: another comment suggests that while JFK has RWSL, it was not installed at the intersection where this occurred.

[0] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl/

#2 is already a thing in Europe, (for example on Heathrow you can hear ATC say "follow the greens", which will guide the planes to the correct Runway entrance: https://youtu.be/7pX9hxn-cmE?t=363)

Or this one, showing how it works in foggy condition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W2ak94xTXM

And an explanation of the system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAn1mfBDDkc

> Are we're relying on pilots who are holding many many things in their heads to follow only the verbal directions of air traffic control?

With how much can be going on at major airports, probably. If ATC routed you on one taxiway the last 10 flights, then switched it up, you could easy repeat back what they told you while still thinking of the old route. Commercial aviation's safety record disagrees with me, though.

#1 sort of already exists, it’s called progressive taxi: https://www.skybrary.aero/articles/progressive-taxi-instruct...

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